EARTHblog » Payal Sampat

Good news: The Romanian parliament rejected the proposed Rosia Montana open-pit gold mine on Monday, after months of protests on the streets of Bucharest and around the world. As we've blogged about before, this mine proposal epitomizes “dirty gold” for many reasons.

Transylvania, Romania, is known for its fictional vampires – this is the region where Bram Stoker set his classic vampire novel, Dracula, in 1897. Over a century later, the region is threatened not by fictional vampires but a very real –and far scarier –monster: the Rosia Montana mine.